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Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Backing Up Your Backup

Is it just me or does everyone else have a backup to a backup of their novel or book?

At times I can get quite anal about it. I've got stories on zip disks, cd-roms, thumb drives, and an online backup site, as well as my hard drive! Yeah, maybe this is over kill, BUT I speak from experience.

Have you ever worked on your novel and had the power go out? Two seconds earlier you thought about hitting the save button but didn't. While quite a few computer word processors have a recovery system in place, did you opt-in on it? Okay, I hear you, power outages are an easy fix.

What about your hard drive crashing and the repair service can't recover the data on your hard drive? What about a house fire that consumes every password you have written in your paper notebook beside your computer. Yes, I see y'all looking right at it, checking to see it's still there.

I also hear you out there who say I write all my stories in long hand and then transfer it to my computer. Have you ever seen the mess fire hoses cause putting out fires? I have. If you have anything on paper it's gone. And really if your house is on fire what's the most important thing on your mind, quick grab my backups? No, it's probably make sure you, your family and pet goldfish are safe. The last thing on my mind was my backup files.

I had one of those nifty 16 mg thumbdrives. It was even on a keychain so I could carry it with me always. I didn't count on the plastic eye the metal part of the keyring breaking. Bye-bye thumb drive. Zip drives get corrupted. CD's get scratches, and I can go on and on.

So online backup seems to be the way to go right? Maybe. Monthly service charges can be quite high. The free services limit the amount you can store. But for your piece of mind it's worth it. Your hometown is struck by a tsunami, but your information is safe. Don't laugh one just struck my relatives in Japan...that was after the earthquake and before the nuclear fall-out. How likely are you going to remember your password to your account?

Quick grab your password notepad. Opps, it's gone. Besides on the news today a hacker has erased files galore and crashed their system. Those sneaky little devils. No, this didn't actually happen, but it could have.

You replace your computer. Fine, now you download your data, except you have a different operating system with your new computer or it's a Mac and you had a twelve-year old PC. You didn't remember to save your file under a txt format so any system could read it.

Yeah, yeah, I hear you. All this stuff won't happen at the same time. Just remember one thing...it's Murphy's Law! You know it, repeat after me...whatever can go wrong-will go wrong! I'm a Murphey so if anything I do believe in it and this is just some St Patrick's Day wisdom humor to chew on.

1 comment:

Ouch! Truth hurts! You've called me out and I need to figure this backup thing out--soon. I've got the handwritten roughs, the thumb drive, the CD and the password book. It might be time to check out Drop Box that everyone touts. Good post, Jo.